Yeah, when you advertise your platform as "Twitter but without the strict moderation", and then people find a ton of calls for violence on your platform, it's a little hard to argue you were actually trying to moderate said content.
Maybe they were, it'll be tricky to show it for certain from our vantage point, but it certainly doesn't help their case that the whole point of platform that they weren't going to moderate said content.
And wink, wink, nudge, nudge because everyone knows what they mean by that.
You can’t build a platform for organizing murders, knowingly allow users to organize murders on your site, and then claim it’s not your fault because technically you aren’t responsible for UGC. Surely there’s a line where it’s just a veneer of an excuse.
Is it possible to build a platform with user generated content that is agnostic regarding the content in the same way that a traditional telco is agnostic about the content of phone calls (or SMS)? Is the difference that the messages are private rather than public?
We don't expect telco's to create filters or to independently moderate or to block the content of phone calls or SMS messages and basically legal mechanisms must be used to trigger any action against a subscriber. I realize that this is largely due to the legal framework of a "common carrier".
What I'm asking is, what would a "common carrier" look like for platform that had user generated content? Perhaps it isn't possible?
Sure. I think you might have a decent argument there for 1:1 messengers or email, but even then, texting spam is now a big problem.
The problem with a social service behaving that way is everyone who tried the "anything goes" approach over the last 30 years started idealistic either gave up and added some rules or became a toxic cesspool.
That makes sense to me. There are zero social environments on earth where some type of obnoxious behavior won't get you thrown out. Why would the web be all that different?
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To be clear, this is a hypothetical about idealists acting in good faith. Over the years we've also seen bad actors feign utopian motives to try and avoid responsibility for their actions, which is a different conversation entirely.
> Is the difference that the messages are private rather than public?
100%. Absolutely.
> We don't expect telco's to create filters or to independently moderate or to block the content of phone calls or SMS messages and basically legal mechanisms must be used to trigger any action against a subscriber. I realize that this is largely due to the legal framework of a "common carrier".
Not only do we not expect it, but the more privacy-oriented people expect it to not even be possible, and use things like end-to-end encryption that make it impossible for the carrier to know what the messages contain.
You answered your own question. Yes, it _is_ that messages are private vs public. Telco has no concept of public. Everything is direct communication. Similarly, you can talk to as many people as you want on twitter in DMs about doing illegal things, and if none of them report you, you won't be cancelled. (I cant confirm whether or not this will trigger a law enforcement investigation or not though). This is why so many spammers user forms of Direct communication. Because the spam ads/posts/etc are usually moderated into oblivion.
Well no, what I was trying to imagine was something beyond messaging that included public, user-generated content but analogous to common-carrier status.
But perhaps there simply is an inherent problem with being a platform for user-generated content and that it requires somewhat robust moderation to avoid being cancelled, sued, or arrested.
> Well no, what I was trying to imagine was something beyond messaging that included public, user-generated content but analogous to common-carrier status.
I think you need to define was "common-carrier" means.
As far as I'm concerned, once a message is deemed to be intended to be public, "common carrier" goes away for the service that is going to be broadcasting that message to others. The copper/fiber/etc. lines between me and Twitter are still a common carrier, because even though my Tweet is going to be public, the individual TCP packets going to Twitter are still intended to be private.
Yeah, I wasn't really talking about that sort of thing. Just trying to speculate on how you could build a platform that supported user-generated content and resolved the difficulties and bias inherent in moderation mechanisms -- a vibrant digital public square that wasn't overwhelmed by bad-actors.
Any moderation system is going to have inherent bias whether it's humans moderating manually or an algorithm.
Any system for publicly posting messages that isn't moderated will be overwhelmed by bad actors, since bad actors will nearly always be kicked off of moderated platforms.
